Bush worse Prez in U.S. history

[thaiphoon]

Look, you seem knowledgeable, and you treat other posters with respect, so please realize I mean to disrespect to you when I say this. You are seeing things through the filter of your political allegiances.

First of all thank you ... secondly most people do. Thirdly - I think mine's relatively in check but then again, how long a minute is depends upon which side of the bathroom door you're on.

To say the thought leaders and outspoken members of the Republican party are mainstream and centrist and the leaders of the Democratic party are extremist is simply false.

Never said that ... look again to what I said. Name for me the bomb throwers who are politicians on the Right and what they have said.

For goodness sake, Republican Congressmen have publically incited violence against judges!

Please provde a link to this incrdulous claim. Or is this more of the liberal mantra that becomes more unbelievable as its told and retold (kind of like the telephone game kids play in school) ??

If you are a neo-con or a christian extremist, I can see how you would be pleased with the direction of the RNC, but if you are a true conservative who believes in traditional conservative values, you should be very concerned with the direction the party and the country are headed.

I'm a Christian in the sense that I believe in God, go to church,etc.... But I'm also not an extremist either. I believe in evolution, etc... etc...

As for a true conservative being concerned, perhaps you can educate me on which things you are worried about. Its hard to have a discussion of the issues when the other person is using generalities.

[cvillehog]

As for a true conservative being concerned, perhaps you can educate me on which things you are worried about. Its hard to have a discussion of the issues when the other person is using generalities.

Of course, it's hard to refute generalities. I was merely trying to make my point without engaging in a protracted discussion.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), in a speech on the floor of the Senate:
"I wonder if there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence."

Let's also not forget DeLay's comment: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today."

Now, perhaps if you assume nothing but the best intentions by these people you don't see anything wrong with these statements. However, you then have to admit that is an inballanced view, since you assume the worst for those you disagree with.

Also, while I don't agree with everything the people in your list of liberal extremists say, I don't think you can credibly call them extremists.

The problem with this entire line of discussion is that it's not actually an issue of the political spectrum. Those who are leading the Republican party appear to be politically agnostic, believing more in opportunism, corporate cronyism and protecting the very rich than in any true type of political idealism. What's worse is, they are using the wedge issues around faith and fears (not to conflate the two) to gain the support of people whose best interests they do not have in mind.

As I said, i would think a true conservative would be quite concerned with the way things are going. You can give credit for the surplus to the republican congress if you want (though I do not cede that point), but then on whom do you blame this disaster of a fiscal situation? Normal economic eb and flow and the damage of 9/11 (all of which are, of course, very real considerations) cannot continue to justify irresponsible fiscal and tax policy forever.

[tcwest10]

I think that you should make yourself available for public office. Obviously, you have a plan to shame all other plans.
Can't wait to see it.

[cvillehog]

I think that you should make yourself available for public office. Obviously, you have a plan to shame all other plans.
Can't wait to see it.

What's the point of waiting two days and then posting a response that has nothing to do with anything?

[crazyhorse1]

Real conservatives tend to give a damn when they see the country headed into trillions of dollars of debt. They also support the constituion in relation to separation of church and state, oppose foreign adventurism, have never been known to practice handing over prisoners for execution and torture in barbaric countries, generally oppose mass propaganda and systematic lying to the public to centralize power...yadda, yadda, yadda. Bush supporters are neocons, not conservatives. They are also extremists-- the same kind of guys who knocked over the twin towers and before that brought us World War 11. Bush supporters, quite literally are: either/or selfish, power mad, ignorant, uneducated, stupid, insane. If you are one of his intelligent and informed supporters, you are the worst of them. You know he lies and do not care. You know he stole one election and probably another. You know he tortures and murders and do not care. You know he is a mad man and do not care. You are as guilty as he is.

[Irn-Bru]

Bush supporters, quite literally are: either/or selfish, power mad, ignorant, uneducation, stupid, insane. If you are one of his intelligent and informed supporters, you are the worst of them. You know he lies and do not care. You know he tortures and murders and do not care. You know he is a mad man and do not care. You are as guilty as he is.

According to you, crazyhorse, 62,040,606 people in America fit this description, and are either incompetent or evil. To me (and, before flaming, remember that I'm not a Bush supporter) that just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Is this part of the debate or are you just trying to get a rise out of people?

(Or, are you just trying to keep a thread that you started alive with whatever it takes?)

[crazyhorse1]

I'm trying to wake people up to what we're doing in Irag and around the world at the moment. We've now killed over 100,000 civilians in Iraq now, over half of them children, and started what is apparently the beginning of a civil war. Further, we are torturing people all over Iraq and Afghanistan--and nobody seems to care. Wake the hell up. Nothing has been cleaned up at Abu Ghraib. Things are worse and spreading. Check out Salon magazine online, Slate magazine, Democratic Underground...on line. Don't take my word for it. Do your homework on what the current extremists posing as traditional Republicans and conservatives are doing to our rights and out country.

[crazyhorse1]

Abortion went down under Clinton, the deficit was erased and a huge surplus created, etc., etc., but none of that stopped the vitriol from even mainstream conservatives. There is nothing anyone named Clinton could ever do that would keep Ann Coulter from spewing her insults in the Clintons' direction.

While I agree with you on Ann Coulter ... the surplus was none of Clinton's doing other than he signed the bills into law. The credit actually belongs to the Republican Congress which took over in January 1995 (after election of 1994). If you doubt me on this I can recap it for you on how it is not the Clinton administrations doing.

As for bomb throwers they are on both sides of the political aisle. That is just a fact of politics. The problem from a moderate Republican view is that while the right's bomb throwers tend to be columnists and talking heads (Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Limbaugh, etc...), the ones on the left tend to be actual Democrat politicians serving in the House and Senate (Pelosi, Boxer, Kennnedy, Kerry,etc...). And while the Republican Party might appreciate the bomb throwers taking shots at the Left they do generally disavow their tactics at least in public. The Democrats actually defend their bomb throwers. After all, I guess one should if they need their help on the next spending bill.

I appreciate your rational arguments and obvious intellect, but putting Kerry, Kennedy, Pelosi, and Boxer in the same group of "bomb throwers" with the likes of Limbaugh, Coulter, and Michael Savage is seriously off-base. Michael Savage is close to insane. I have difficulty believing that you would defend his racist rants; and do you seriously believe that Kennedy and Kerry and Boxer traffic in the kind of outright lies and distortions that Colter and Limbaugh use to rouse the masses? Do you understand that it is difficult for an educated person who tries to avoid predjudice and bigotry to embrace a so-called "conservative" world view if it is part and parcel of the venom of such imbeciles as Coulter, Savage, and Limbaugh, as well as such lying criminals as Bush?

[skinz74]

It's perfectly within your free speech to discredit military operations in a foreign land. You've called my Commander in Chief every name under the sun short of your President. President Bush I'm sure is aware that his decisions aren't always popular ones...especially to the elite left. But perhaps you can manage to come down off your thrown for a minute or two to speak with us "common" folk.

The eighteen year old boys and girls that are scared out of their minds are able to complete their mission most efficiently when they have the understanding that their families and Countrymen support what they are doing. For you to incite that we (the Military) are actively and aggresively terrorizing POW is ignorant and STUPID. The ignorance portion comes from the fact that I have been trained in psyops and interrogation tactics, and have been on the receiving end twice for SERE school and I'm sure you have not...which means you speak of things only from what you have heard through the media. The stupidity portion comes from the fact that you accept that load of malarky as fact and SOP and try to preach it to others.

You are a fine case of Darwinism gone wrong. But, on a positive note for you...you'll have another crack at ruining this Great Country in 4 more years. Cheers...

[crazyhorse1]

Don't make me play the Nam card, Grasshopper. I'm probably forty years older than you are. We were guilty then and you are guilty now-- perhaps not individually, but collectively. Your generation is not stripping and torturing ragheads in about the same way my generation didn't shoot unarmed gooks from heliocopters. Did the media fake the pictures? Is the international red cross lying to everyone? Did the media fake the memoes from Gonzales? Maybe CBS faked the memoes that have surfaced in the British parliament? Did Pulitzer Prize winner Sy Hersh phony up his whole book. Did the administration not fight the Supreme court for the right to indefinately retain uncharged prisoners. No dogs? No menstral blood? No pyramids of Iraqi dongs and 80 year olds sleeping in their excretement? Were no prisoners sent for interrogation and/or torture and execution in foreign bastians of freedom and democracy such as Uzbekistan and Egypt? Did CNN make up the term Extrordinary Rendition? The Times, the Post, the Christian Science Monitor-- all liars? How about that 25 year old who demonstrated on Sixty Minutes how he rocked to heavy metal music while blowing up Iraqi housing and (possibly) civilians (latest estimate-- 100,000 dead, 50,000 children). Get a grip. Here's a few other things to come to grips with: the holocaust happened, Custer was a bad guy, the Pilgrims put a bounty on the scalps of indians. God is not always on our side. Am I going too fast for you?

[Irn-Bru]

President Bush will arrive at my college tomorrow morning to give the commencement address. A lot of people are pretty up-in-arms about it. . .but most seem to want to protest him as a person, rather than something about his policies taht they actually agree with.

[skinz74]

I'm 31, so unless your a fossil, your not 40 years older than I. You have done such a FANTASTIC job illustrating a collage of gloom and doom.

Now riddle me this, grasshopper...All I've seen you do is ***** about how our President is evil, blah, blah, blah...what is your grand solution, O great one. Since obviously you've figured the whole Vietnam thing out...maybe you should run for office. Oh, but then you would be the one responsible for the evils of the world. I've lived in 3 different countries and visited more than I can show on both hands and this I know; the majority of the World DOES NOT LIKE US.

And no, it hasn't mattered if we had a republican or a democrat in office at the time. They've hated us equally with George H. Bush and that guy that played saxaphone and ran the country when he had some spair time, equally. So inform us of your master plan to:


A. Defend our national borders without "stepping on anyone's toes."
B. Strengthen our image abroad
C. Combat terrorism so that it doesn't come to our front door to play.
I could go on, and on...but it's not necessary. Because I believe you'll never accept my point of view just like I'll never accept yours.

Bottom line, a few bad apples does not spoil the tree. Just because there happen to be some IDIOTS that were caught doing things to POWs that I'm sure were not orders, doesn't mean there aren't thousands of other soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines changing peoples lives positively. So unless you can provide some constructive criticism, then consider this a closed argument.

Too fast for me, please. I've lived foreign policy for the past 12 years...try taking it outta neutral, there soup-sandwich.

[crazyhorse1]

I'm a fossil in my sixties, have run for office and served as a convention delegate (Dem, Va.), have visited a number of foreign countries, have published nineteen books, 2000 articles, have three graduate degrees and played major college football back before the time of helmet cages. I would fight terrorism by attacking Bin Laden, not Iraq, a country Bin Laden is delighted we're attacking because he hates Iraqis and their secular tradition as much as he hates us. U.S.atrocities are widespread and ordered from the top, which is proven. The rational for the war was fraudulent, also proven. The job Bush is doing protecting our borders is pathetic. Bush is asleep at the wheel about Korea, Iran, Al Qaida (which is just playing in Iraq), Uzbeckistan, Pakistan, etc. By the way, the White House is not even bothering to deny its torture policy anymore. Bush actually defended illegal policy in his last national address.

[cvillehog]

I support the troops. And they are telling me they don't like the Bush Administration policy: http://www.operationtruth.com

[skinz74]

Though I still don't agree, I do respect your opinion and that you've provided some of your solutions to make things better. That's all I really wanted. So many people wanna complain about the administration, but yet say NOTHING about how they would handle it. And given that I've dedicated my career to the miitary...I'm going to be a little more sensitive to people bashing my Commander in Chief without warrant.

[cvillehog]

Though I still don't agree

How can you "disagree" with verifiable facts. like the Bush administration manipulation of the truth (read: lies) leading up to the war?

[Hog Heaven]

I find that little ever comes from political debates, so I will no argue or defend my viewpoint, but my 2 cents is that Bush is one of our greatest persidents EVER.

[skinz74]

"Verifiable..." Hmm...And I suppose that depends on which side of the newspaper you read. Unless either of us is present when something happens, we are subject to second hand representation. That's where truths get "molded/unmolded" to fit the story. I'm not so naive to believe that republicans don't get more than their fair shake on Fox news, while democrats get more consideration with CNN. And thats just the basics.

If there were even a remote chance that there were WMD inside Iraq, given the mindstate of Saddam, and his disdain of the U.S., wouldn't you want to find them...??? And isn't it also possible that they were moved prior to the invasion to any number of bordering countries that also harbor terrorism? YOU CANNOT ANSWER these questions and neither can I because we will probably never know. But, if a nuclear war would have started for our lack of effort...well, we probably wouldn't be sitting here comfortably discussing it.

[crazyhorse1]

I'll give you four stars for that point and applaud. In fact, I supported the invasion at the time on the grounds you cite. My disillusionment came later, when I became convinced I'd been conned and the attempt to capture Bin Laden had been dropped in favor of the President embarking on an undisclosed agenda. Here's a list of other recent presidents who pulled major con jobs on the American people: Kennedy-- phony Cuban crisis, Bay of Pigs, Nam, assassination of Diem, election fraud; Nixon--election fraud, criminal conspiracy, Cambodian bombings, phony peace plan; Reagan: refusal to act on aids, Iran-contra, sponsorship of death squads in South America; Clinton-- phony civil rights activist, phony civil liberties advocate, phony supporter of the working class.
I also think that LBJ probably had a hand in a number of outrageous acts/cons that history will eventually nail him for; and that the elder Bush had a background in racism he was able to submerge, as well as a connection for the Saudis that has had a huge effect on our world-- but these things are yet to be established.
Suffice it to say, I'm tired of being suckered by Commanders in Chief and am quite ready to call our current miscreant to account.

[cvillehog]

74,
I'm talking about things like the Downing St. Memo. Good for you that you can continue to cling to your convictions in the face of facts to the contrary, just by calling those facts opinions. You must live in a much happier world than anyone who values the truth right now. Because, no one -- not the republicans, not the demorcrats, not the corporate media -- cares the least bit for the truth.

[skinz74]

Though I think that Crazyhorse1 and I at least have an understanding of each other, I ? what point you are trying to get across...unless you are deriving your information from underground mass media.

If you're referring to my head buried in the sand...let me assure you that it is not. Part of my core values are Honor, Courage, and Commitment. So, I can assure you, kind sir, that I value the truth as much as any other RED blooded America.

I will agree with you that our daily dissemination of information in whatever form is misleading and cultured at best. But, I also keep in mind that our political system is derived of 3 branches. Each having the power to stop something dead in its tracks. So you can't possibly think that every policy was crafted by the President?

And you keep referring to things you've read as FACT. But then you contradict yourself by stating that "no one -- not the republicans, not the demorcrats, not the corporate media -- cares the least bit for the truth."

[tcwest10]

Sadly, the only person that truly knows how to run the country is too busy posting here and calling himself CrazyHorse.
It's easy to criticize, isn't it ? That's your right as an American taxpayer, so have at it. You're entitled to your opinions, and you're obligated to allow others to have theirs.
My great-grandfather, paternal grandfather, birth father, uncle, and three cousins have all died in various wars and conflicts to ensure that you have the right to speak your mind.
Good luck with your campaign, bubba. Watch them interns.

[John Manfreda]

W is the Man

[John Manfreda]

Bush was blammed for a lot of things he inherited, like the recesssion that happened 6 months before Bush took office. How he handeled 9/11 was pretty good. Another college tution. This is the facts and I did a paper on it so don't tell me other wise. The reason that tution has gone up is because in the later 70' Nixon delared a war on drugs. Since than people have had a tough on crime approach, which means more death penalty and longer sentencing. That leads less money in the budget and prision overrcrowding. So to build more prisons to accomadate all the harsh sentencing they cut money from the college budget, raised the tution, and built more prisions so they could keep up with the huge incarcerration rate. That is why prision reform is a huge issue with Arnold (governor of California), so he could save money, lower the budgets, and lower college tutions. That is why he called them a bunch of Girly man. There is more but I don't feel like typing up my 12 page paper to explain all of it to you all.

[Fios]

Well, Manfreda wrote a paper about it, I guess that pretty much closes the issue. Notify your family and friends. Next up: Manfreda writes a 12 page solution to the Israeli-Palestenian conflict.
Go get 'em tiger!